Tag Archives: future cities

Too often, debates on smart cities revolve around terms such as “Internet of things”, “big data”, and “sensors”. However, there is a growing realisation that truly smart cities take a more person-centric approach, which focuses on the needs of citizens and harnesses their skills, talents and experience.

Crowdsourcing is one approach that can help cities do just that. From Danish toy maker Lego to tech giant Amazon, organisations are using digital tools to gather views, opinions, data, and even money from citizens. Public sector institutions have also got involved, introducing projects that engage with citizens, as well as tap into external skills through events such as hackathons (where civic hackers come together to solve key city problems).

Already, there is a wide range of crowdsourcing initiatives across the world. Below I’ve highlighted some of the best.

Scottish Government

In 2015, the Scottish Government’s Open Data and Fisheries teams introduced Dialogue, a citizen engagement tool developed by Delib (a social enterprise based in the UK and Australia).

The Open Data team were in the process of creating an open data plan for public bodies. They felt that crowdsourcing could help them gain a greater understanding of the types and formats of datasets people would be interested in, and as such, posed a series of questions to citizens.

The Fisheries Team took to crowdsourcing to gather the views on a proposal to create a ‘kill licence’ and carcass tagging regime for salmon. As they knew this would be controversial, they wanted to gain a better understanding of the concerns in fishing communities, and to see if there were any better approaches.

Both teams learned a lot of useful lessons from the process. These included:

ensuring questions were as specific as possible so citizens could understand;

marketing projects to specific communities with an interest in the question raised;

MK: Smart – Milton Keynes’ wide ranging smart cities programme – has introduced an online platform known as Our MK to connect with citizens. This award-winning project supports people in playing a central role in urban innovation, from crowdsourcing initial ideas through to finding mentoring support and funding through their dedicated SpaceHive page.

The platform’s citizen ideas competition offers up to £5,000 worth of funding to turn ideas into reality. So far it’s generated over 100 ideas, with 13 projects being allocated funding. This includes the Go Breastfeeding MK App (an app which promotes the use of breastfeeding within Milton Keynes) and the gamification of Redways (which saw an app developed to encourage people to explore the Redways network – a series of shared use paths for cyclists and pedestrians.)

Madrid City Council

In 2016, Madrid City Council launched Decide Madrid. The platform played a key role in supporting the city’s participatory budgeting process, allowing citizens to propose, debate, and rank ideas submitted to the website. Once citizens had chosen their top proposals, city employees checked the ideas against viability criteria and a cost report was carried out. If the proposal failed to meet the criteria, a report was published explaining why it had been excluded.

Decide Madrid provided guidance of what was allowed and what was not (offline meetings were also used to explain the limitations of the scheme), to ensure that only valid proposals were checked. This ensured the initiative didn’t become too labour intensive.

In the 2016 Budget, €60 million was set aside. By the time the process had finished, citizens had debated over 5,000 initial ideas, with 225 projects being chosen for funding.

Reykjavik City Council

Better Reykjavik was introduced to provide a direct link for citizens to Reykjavik City Council. The online platform enables citizens to voice, debate and prioritise the issues that they believe will improve their city. For example, Icelandic school children have suggested the need for more field trips.

In 2010, the platform played an important role in Reykjavik’s city council elections, providing a space for all political parties to crowdsource ideas for their campaign. After the election, Jón Gnarr, former Mayor of Reykjavik, encouraged citizens to use the platform during coalition talks. Within a four week period (before and after the election), 40% of Reykjavik’s voters had used the platform and almost 2000 priorities had been created.

Overall, almost 60% of citizens have used the platform, and the city has spent approximately £1.7 million on developing projects sourced from citizens.

Final thoughts

Crowdsourcing is more than just creating a flashy website or app. It’s a process which requires strategic planning and investment. If you’re planning your own initiative, seeking out good practice and learning from the experience of others is a great place to start.

This article was based on the briefing ‘The crowdsourced city: engaging citizens in smart cities’. Idox Information Service members can access this briefing via our customer website.

As cities realise the need to improve sustainability, many are turning to innovative technologies to address challenges such as traffic congestion and air pollution. Here, the ‘smart agenda’, with its focus on technology and urban infrastructure, overlaps with the ‘sustainability agenda’ – usually associated with energy, waste management, and transport.

In 2015, an international research project – coordinated by the University of Exeter and involving teams from the UK, China, the Netherlands, France, and Germany – was launched to investigative how smart-eco initiatives can be used to promote the growth of the green economy. As part of this work, the report ‘Smart-eco cities in the UK: trends and city profiles 2016’ was published.

Below we’ve highlighted some interesting case studies from this report.

Glasgow

Glasgow’s smart city approach has been described as ‘opportunistic’ (as opposed to strategy-led) by the report’s authors. New initiatives are often linked to creative organisations/individuals and competition funding, such as Future City Glasgow, which was awarded £24 million by the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK).

Nonetheless, this has helped Glasgow become a smart city leader, not just in the UK, but globally.

Almost half of the £24 million Innovate UK funding was spent on the Operations Centre, located in Glasgow’s east end. The new state-of-the-art facility integrates traffic and public safety management systems, and brings together public space CCTV, security for the city council’s museums and art galleries, traffic management and police intelligence. As well as helping the police and emergency services, the centre can prioritise buses through traffic (when there are delays) and has recently supported the Clean Glasgow initiative, a project to tackle local environmental issues, such as littering.

Intelligent street lighting was also a major part of Future City Glasgow. Three sections of the city have been fitted with new lighting: a walkway along the River Clyde; a partly pedestrianised section of Gordon Street; and Merchant City, a popular retail and leisure district. The new lighting includes built-in sensors which provide real-time data on sound levels, air quality, and pedestrian footfall. ‘Dynamic’ lights, which use motion sensors to vary lighting – increasing levels when pedestrians walk by – have also been introduced.

London

London’s smart city programme is linked to the challenges it faces as a leading global city. Its need for continuous growth and remaining competitive has to be balanced with providing infrastructure, services, and effective governance.

The Greater London Authority (GLA) is behind both the strategy, through the Smart London Board, and the practical delivery of various activities. Much of their work focuses on encouraging collaboration between business, the technology sector, and the residents of London. For example, the London Datastore, which includes over 650 governmental (and some non-governmental) data sets, plays an important role in ensuring the city’s data is freely available to all. Visitors can view a wide variety of statistics and data graphics, on areas such as recycling rates, numbers of bicycles hired, and carbon dioxide emission levels by sector.

In 2014, the Smart London District Network was established to explore how technology could be used in four regeneration projects: Croydon; Elephant & Castle; Imperial West; and the London Olympic Park. To support this, the Institute for Sustainability was commissioned to run a competition asking technology innovators to pitch innovative ideas for these projects. Winners of this competition included the company Stickyworld, who created an online platform which supports stakeholder engagement through a virtual environment, and Placemeter, who developed an intelligent online platform which analyses the data taken from video feeds and provides predictive insights.

Manchester

Recently, the City of Manchester Council consolidated their smart city initiatives into the Smarter City Programme. The Smart-eco cities report explains that the programme draws on the city’s 2012 submission to the ‘Future Cities Demonstrator’ competition, focusing on the development of Manchester’s Oxford Road ‘Corridor’ around five main themes:

enhanced low carbon mobility

clean energy generation and distribution

more efficient buildings

integrated logistics and resource management

community and citizen engagement

Manchester’s approach to becoming a smarter city involves a wide range of partners. For instance, Triangulum is a €25m European Commission project involving Manchester and two other cities (Eindhoven and Stavanger) to transform urban areas into ‘smart quarters’.

In Manchester, the council-led project will integrate mobility, energy, and informations and communications technology (ICT) systems into the infrastructure along the Corridor. It will introduce a range of technologies into assets such as the University of Manchester Electrical Grid, with the aim of showing their potential for supplying, storing and using energy more effectively in urban environments. Data visualisation techniques, based on the use of real-time data, will also be developed.

In 2016, Manchester launched CityVerve, a £10 million collaborative project to demonstrate internet of things technologies. The project will involve several smart city initiatives, including:

talkative bus stops, which use digital signage and sensors, to provide information to passengers and provide data to bus operators on the numbers waiting for buses

air quality sensors in the street furniture

‘Community Wellness’ sensors in parks, along school and commuter routes, to encourage exercise

a ‘biometric sensor network’, to help people manage their chronic respiratory conditions

Final thoughts

There is great excitement about the potential for smart city technologies. However, as is highlighted by the smart-eco cities report, many are limited in scale, short term, and based on competition funding. If we want to create sustainable cities, which meets challenges of the future, greater investment will be needed from both public and private sector.

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In 2013, Glasgow City Council won £24 million worth of funding from Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board) that would see the city become a ‘living lab’ for smart city projects.

Although Glasgow has been more synonymous with low life expectancies (the so called ‘Glasgow Effect’) and urban deprivation, the funding was intended to transform Glasgow into a world leading smart city, with the technologies piloted by Glasgow eventually being used in other cities.

The projects proposed by Glasgow City Council were designed to explore innovative ways to use technology and data to make the city ‘safer, smarter and more sustainable’.

However, three years on, with the majority of the work complete, has the programme been a success?

Managing a future city

From the beginning, Future City Glasgow set out an ambitious programme for change. However, it wasn’t just the experimental nature of the technologies or implementing them in such a short space of time which caused challenges. The programme also had an important role to play in the security of the 2014 Commonwealth Games – a major international event for the city.

Just under half of the programme’s funding was spent on a new state-of-the-art Operations Centre, integrating traffic and public safety management systems, and bringing together public space CCTV, security for the city council’s museums and art galleries, traffic management and police intelligence.

Although this has required significant investment, the centre has enabled Glasgow to take a ‘proactive’ approach to traffic management and public safety. Video analytics tools, for example, provide operation centre operators with better information to help respond to emerging events. And traffic operators have control over the city’s signalling, allowing them to prioritise late-running public transport. CCTV cameras have also been upgraded to full HD, providing better images for operators and an important source of evidence for Police Scotland.

Demonstrator projects

A major part of Future City Glasgow’s work has been introducing a number of demonstrator projects. According to Gary Walker, programme director at Future City Glasgow, these focus on four main themes: energy; active travel (encouraging people to walk and cycle); public safety; and transport. Some of the most notable projects, include:

Intelligent street lighting – the Riverside Walkway has lighting which switches on when people walk by, and Gordon Street has lighting which provides real time data on noise levels, footfall, and air pollution.

Sensor technology in retrofitting – low cost sensors (the BuildAx and the Eltek GC-05) have been deployed in buildings throughout Glasgow to evaluate the impact of insulation projects.

The Glasgow Cycling App – an easy to use platform has been created to encourage cyclists to share their experiences of cycling and to generate data that could help citizens plan journeys or highlight areas the council should target for improvement.

The challenge of data

Much of Future City Glasgow has been underpinned by data sharing – including traffic data gathered by the Operations Centre and citizen-generated data from the Glasgow Cycling App.

However, ‘freeing’ this data proved challenging, as sharing data went against the traditional working culture of local government. As Gary Walker explained to the Guardian newspaper:

“Change can be challenging – especially when you are driving something that appears to contradict everything you’ve had drummed into you for years. Initially, organisations were nervous when we asked them to release their data because people know they must protect it. But once they realised that we were not asking for sensitive or personal data they began to relax a little and appreciate the value in creating a data hub.”

After some awareness raising and reassurance, the Glasgow Data Launchpad, a publicly available repository for the city’s data, now has over 400 datasets from 60 organisations, including Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Life (which delivers cultural, sporting and learning activities on behalf of Glasgow City Council), and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Looking to the future

As Gary Walker noted at a recent Smart Cities event, Future City Glasgow has received a lot of international interest. The programme has also won a number of awards, including:

Winner – Geospatial World Excellence Awards 2015

Winner – NextGen Digital Challenge (Digital Innovation) 2015

Winner – Holyrood Connect ICT (Innovation) 2015

However, it’s important that the city doesn’t become complacent and continues to progress with smart city initiatives. Alan Robertson, in an article for Holyrood magazine, suggests that financial pressures facing local councils may put initiatives in jeopardy. For instance, he highlights that Glasgow City Council leader Frank McAveety has warned that the city faces “impossible budget cuts”.

There are, however, some positive signs that work will continue. Last year, the Scottish Government introduced Smart Cities Scotland, a new programme which aims to make Scotland’s cities more efficient and greener, and more attractive to potential investors. The programme received £10 million in European funding and will involve a collaboration between Scotland’s seven cities and the Scottish Government.

Final thoughts

Future City Glasgow has had many successes since it was launched three years ago. Although Smart Cities Scotland promises less funding, Future Cities Glasgow has provided the smart city infrastructure capable of supporting new projects.

In terms of driving growth, it will also be interesting to see how Glasgow City Council responds to new forces within future cities, including disruptive business models and technologies, such as controversial tech companies Uber and Airbnb.

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On 14th September, Holyrood held a smart cities event at Strathclyde University’s Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC). It was chaired by Willy Roe CBE, an expert in public service reform, and brought delegates together from local and central government, academia, and the private sector.

The smart cities agenda is becoming increasingly important as cities face significant challenges, including climate change, traffic congestion, and ageing populations. However, as Dr Lorraine Hudson, Research Fellow at the Open University, highlighted, only 18% of people have heard of smart cities. This issue of ‘engagement’ became a key theme for the event, with delegates wondering how we engage citizens in smart cities.

Future City Glasgow

Gary Walker, former Programme Director for Future City Glasgow, spoke about the council’s success in exploring ‘innovative ways to use technology and data to make life in the city safer, smarter and more sustainable’.

With £24 million in Innovate UK funding, a number of demonstrator projects were introduced, including:

creating a new state-of-the-art Operations Centre, with integrated, traffic and public safety management system, bringing together public space CCTV, security for the city council’s museums and art galleries, traffic management and police intelligence

introducing intelligent street lighting in areas, such as the Riverside Walkway, which switch on when people walk by, and Gordon Street, where lighting provides real time data on noise levels, footfall, and air pollution

The council has also incorporated a number of community engagement initiatives. These include:

Engagement hubs – the hubs provide information to citizens about smart cities, and were spread out across Glasgow, including the main hub on Buchanan Street and in communities such as Easterhouse and Pollock.

The Glasgow Cycling App – the easy to use platform was designed to encourage cyclists to share their experiences of cycling, generating data that could help others plan journeys or highlight areas to target for improvement

‘Gamified’ engagement tool – this tool was developed in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and a local company, and aims to encourage people to modify their energy behaviours

Time to involve the people?

Dr Lorraine Hudson presented research from the Institution of Engineering and Technology. It highlighted that:

people’s views are the most important considerations when taking cities forward

introducing new city-wide technologies has been done without consulting citizens

the public has yet to buy into the idea of smart cities and are not convinced by the value and benefits on their lives

She also posed the question of whether citizens should be thought of as passive ‘consumers’ or ‘co-creators’ of smart cities.

In addition, Dr Hudson provided some statistics on the free Smart Cities course run by the Open University. They showed that over 23,000 people had joined since 2014, with 45% ‘knowing little or nothing’ about smart cities prior to the course. There was also interest from over 100 countries, including Brazil, India and Ukraine.

Interestingly, she suggested that participants’ comments could be mined to understand citizens’ views on topics such as open data, privacy and leadership.

Mazi Project

Dr Michael Smyth provided an insight into the MAZI project, a collaborative EU initiative which sets out to empower people to use technology to shape their local public spaces.

The innovative aspect of the project involves the use of ‘Do-It-Yourself networking’ – a combination of wireless technology, low-cost hardware, and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) applications. By making these technologies understood and easy to customise, configure and deploy, MAZI hopes to empower citizens to build their own local networks to facilitate physical, hybrid and virtual interactions within communities.

Panel Discussion

Ben Miller, Policy and Communications Officer from Smart Energy GB, commented on the UK’s rollout of smart meters. He explained that although many meters had been replaced, some members of the public were still reluctant to have the new smart meters installed. It was suggested that they represented the ‘spy in the house’, with some people concerned over the data being recorded and sent to electricity suppliers.

Ritchie Somerville, Innovation and Futures Manager at Edinburgh City Council, reflected on the impact of their budget challenge planner, an engagement tool which enabled citizens to have their say on how public money should be spent. The council used the feedback gathered to help make decisions when finalising the budget. The tool received over 3000 ‘engagements’ and was deemed to be a success by the council.

Mr Somerville also highlighted the importance of explaining the benefits of smart cities. He explained that most citizens are happy to sign up to social media and store club cards because of the services and rewards they receive. In his view, providing the opportunity to opt into services and showing the clear benefits should ease concerns over privacy.

Dr Hudson provided some further thoughts on the need for engagement. She noted that smart city project ‘Bristol is Open’ used an open blog to encourage debate. Additionally, she warned that failing to consult citizens could lead to a lack of trust. Another delegate highlighted Edinburgh Airport, who implemented a £1 drop-off charge without consultation, and are struggling to engage local residents over plans to change flight routes.

Scott Moore, Business Analyst at the Improvement Service, described his experience learning from Seoul’s (South Korea) main digital transformation body. In response to a question on cultural differences, he explained that the use of digital technology is more widespread in Seoul, amongst all age groups. He suggested that encouraging an increased take-up of digital technology would be a key challenge for Scotland. The Carnegie Trust and the Wheatley Group are two organisations who have been doing excellent work in tackling digital exclusion.

Final thoughts

The event provided a great opportunity to reflect on the future of cities. Although public budgets are reducing, it was felt that investing in a smarter approach to cities was a worthwhile endeavour. With the introduction of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act, many felt that this was an ideal time for local authorities to engage with citizens, and ensure smart cities are not just focused on technology, but are truly citizen-led.

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The project is a joint venture between the University of Bristol and Bristol City Council. Several other partners are involved, including national and European governments and commercial organisations, such as Japanese technology firm NEC. This collaborative project will act as a ‘laboratory’ for research and development initiatives and will help shape the development of smart cities and the ‘internet of things’.

Paul Wilson, Managing Director of Bristol Is Open, explains what’s so innovative about the project:

“We use a software-defined network (SDN) to run the city in Bristol and then we apply network functions virtualization (NFV) into that network, which is allowing us to have an elastic and scalable network that we can slice to thousands of different users.”

In simple terms, the city is in the process of creating a world leading digital infrastructure. This includes: 144 core fibres in the ground; a mile-long stretch of wireless connectivity along the harbourside, which will include experimental wireless technology such as 5G mobile broadband; and a selection of internet of things sensors and technologies, including 1,500 lampposts. All of which, will be interconnected and controlled by software.

A key advantage of this new model is the ability to splice up the network for different users. This provides the opportunity for new partners to become involved, including community organisations and small start-up companies. Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, Project Lead and Chief Technology Officer at Bristol is Open, also explains that the network is “open, agnostic and programmable”, ready to be adopted for the technologies of the future.

Interestingly, the core fibres were installed in a network of redundant ducts purchased by the council over ten years ago. Previously, they had provided cable television to homes in Bristol in the 1970s.

The 98-seat Bristol Data Dome is connected to a high-performance computer at the University of Bristol (via a 30Gb/s fibre link). The Data Dome, supported by the network and high-speed computer, provides an opportunity to visualise complex experiments, create virtual reality environments and give audience members their own unique perspective.

The dome has been used to show content from earth sciences, as well as real time sociological mapping in cities. Engineers, at corporate sponsor Rolls Royce, have also used the Dome to visualise engines and to inspire young people about engineering.

‘No grand visions’

In a recent TED talk, Stephen Hilton, Leader of Bristol City Council’s Futures Group, states that ‘he doesn’t like to spout grand visions’. Instead, he explains that the Bristol is Open team prefers to focus on tangible targets and introduce measures that lay the groundwork for smart cities.

He highlights that the project aims to:

reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2020;

create 95,000 new jobs, particularly in high growth sectors such as the creative industries and green technology;

have Bristol recognised among the top 20 European cities by 2020.

Smart Cities Index

Huawei’s Smart Cities Index highlights five important themes for creating successful smart city programmes. These include:

the importance of leadership and vision

a need to focus on local priorities and strengths

the importance of engagement with local communities

building local partnerships

understanding the way in which the data revolution can improve services and boost innovation

Privacy

George Ferguson, former Mayor of Bristol, recognised the challenges surrounding data privacy. He acknowledged that privacy can lead to heated debate and advised that cities should help shape the debate, rather than leave it to technology companies. For him, understanding how citizens want their data to be used is an important part of the Bristol is Open project.

However, this may not satisfy those concerned about lampposts with “acoustic detection sensors” capable of recording noise levels, possibly speech.

Final thoughts

Bristol’s commitment to becoming a truly smart city has led to its award winning status. In the future, it will be interesting to see if it’s ambitious, yet pragmatic, approach will help to address some of the city’s key challenges, such as reducing carbon emissions. More importantly, it will be interesting to see whether the lessons learnt in Bristol, will be introduced in other cities, and whether we move away from the idea of smart cities to a ‘smart nation.’

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Efficient transport is vital to the smooth running of businesses and everyday life in a city. The emergence of new technologies is rapidly transforming both traffic management systems and the analysis of travel activity and transport modelling.

At the Open Data Awards last week, the Greater London Authority won the Open Data Publisher Award, with the opening up of Transport for London’s data infrastructure being highlighted as an example of how whole systems thinking can create an ecosystem and value chain supported by data.

Smart transport solutions

Within the UK, initiatives such as the Future Cities Demonstrator (based in Glasgow) and the Catapult Centres, both established by Innovate UK (fomerly the Technology Strategy Board), are exploring innovative ways to use technology and data to make life in cities safer, smarter and more sustainable. The UK Government has also continued its support with its announcement in the March 2015 budget of new funding to support the technology market around the Internet of Things.

Smart solutions involve data gathering, real-time processing, data analytics and visualisation. Using data ultimately aims to support better decision and enable innovation. New technologies and availability of data, and the near-universal uptake of mobile devices, therefore offers an opportunity to innovate in order to make our urban areas more adaptive and resilient.

‘Intelligent mobility’ is a sector of the wider transport industry which is predicted to be worth around £900 billion a year globally by 2025. A recent report suggested however that the UK faces major transport-related data gaps which limit its ability to take advantage of this market. In some cases this relates to datasets which do not yet exist at all in the UK, and in other cases to datasets which exist only in ‘silos’ or which are not yet open or freely available.

Data supports transport planning

Transport for London has allowed their data, which has been collected from Oyster Smart Card use, to be open and available to developers to create a range of Apps which allow the public access to travel information, much of it real-time.

Many councils across the UK are using data to improve journey planning in a similar way. The itravelsmart App from Cheshire West & Chester Council won the Best Smarter Travel App award at this year’s Smarter Travel Awards for a tool that integrates travel information, interactive maps and public transport timetables.

At a city-wide level, using an intelligent transport system can also help improve capacity and manage traffic flows. Cities such as Amsterdam, have been leading the way in using open data to support transport planning – back in 2012 Amsterdam won the World Smart Cities Awards 2012 with its Open Data Program for transport and mobility. Since March 2012, the city’s department for Infrastructure, Traffic and Transportation (DIVV) has made available all its data on traffic and transportation to interested parties. Data about parking (tariffs, availability, time), taxi stands, cyclepaths, and stops for touring cars are public now, as well as real-time information on traffic jams on main roads around the city.

The Urban Big Data Centre was established by the UK Economic and Social Research Council to address social, economic and environmental challenges facing cities. It launched in 2014 and focuses on methods and technologies to manage, link and analyse multi-sectoral urban Big Data, and to demonstrate the use of such information, for example in transport planning.

From smarter data to smarter decisions

To make a city smart and to use smart infrastructure, it’s vital that the transport system functions to the best of its ability. By utilising data from a variety of sources, such as open transport data, sensor data, crowdsourcing and other social media sources, it seems there is potential for a huge improvement in efficiency by increasing integration.

Encouraging modal shift can also have an impact on environmental problems, such as pollution and carbon emissions. Using data, whether it is open data or big data, can help inform evidence-based decision-making in these important policy areas.

Sometimes it feels like every city in the world is now claiming to be ‘smart’. Our research team regularly add new reports on the topic to our database. And with a policy agenda riding on the back of a multi-billion pound global industry, the positivist rhetoric around smart cities can seem overwhelming.

We’ve blogged before about the disconnect between what surveys suggest the public values in terms of quality of life in urban areas, and what smart cities are investing in. And last week I attended a conference in Glasgow ‘Designing smart cities: opportunities and regulatory challenges’ which refreshingly brought together a multi-disciplinary audience to look at smart cities in a more critical light.

The conference was rich and wide-ranging – too broad for me to try and summarise the discussions. Instead here are some reflections on the challenges which need to be explored.

Every smart city is a surveillance city

Look in any smart city prospectus or funding announcement and you’ll find mention of how data will be ‘managed’, ‘captured’, ‘monitored’, ‘shared’, ‘analysed’, ‘aggregated’, ‘interrogated’ etc. And this is inevitably presented as a benign activity happening for the common good, improving efficiency, saving money and making life better.

As David Murakami Wood pointed out at the conference however, this means that every smart city is by necessity a surveillance city – even if policymakers and stakeholders are reluctant to admit this.

Public debate is failing to keep up with the pace of change

Even for someone who takes a keen interest in urbanism and the built environment, any description of smart cities can risk leaving you feeling like a techno-illiterate dinosaur. It’s clear that there is also a huge amount of hype around the construction (or retrofitting) of smart cities – with vested interests keen to promote a positive message.

Do we really understand the possibilities being opened up when we embed technology in our urban infrastructure? And more importantly, what are the ethical questions raised around sharing and exploiting data? The pace of the development and rollout of new technologies within our urban environments seems to be running ahead of the desirable cycle of reflection and critique.

An interesting point was also made about language – and whether experts, technologists and policymakers need to adjust their use of language and jargon, in order for discussion about smart cities to be inclusive. Ubicomp … augmented reality … the Internet of Things … even the Cloud – how can the public give informed consent to participating in the smart city if the language used obscures and obfuscates what is happening with their data?

Where can we have a voice in the data city?

Following on from this point, cities are not ends in themselves – to be successful they must serve the interests and needs of the people who live, work and visit them. An interesting strand of the conference discussion considered what a bottom-up approach to smart cities would look like.

Alison Powell highlighted that there’s been a shift from seeing people as citizens to treating them as ‘citizen consumers’ – I’d add that within the built environment, this goes hand-in-hand with the commercialisation and privatisation of public space – and this has profound implications around questions of inclusion/exclusion. And also where power and decision-making sits – and who is profiting.

Although some general examples of community participation projects were mentioned during the conference, these didn’t seem to address the question of how ‘people’ can engage with smart cities. Not as problems to be managed or controlled – or as passive suppliers of data to sensors – but as creative and active participants.

Conclusion

I left the conference wondering where society is heading and how we, the Knowledge Exchange, can support our members in local government and the third sector to understand the extensive opportunities and implications of smart cities. We see a key part of our mission to be horizon scanning – and our briefings for members focus on drawing together analysis, emerging evidence and case studies.

Not all towns or cities have the resources, investment or desire to lead the way in technological innovation. But the challenge of bridging the gap between professionals and their vision and understanding of smart cities, and people in communities, is a universal one.

As William Gibson observed: “The future is already here … it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

The Idox Information Service can give you access to a wealth of further information on smart cities or public participation. To find out more on how to become a member, contact us.

Our reading list prepared for last autumn’s Annual UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference looks at some recent literature on smart cities.

The Idox Group is the leading applications provider to UK local government for core functions relating to land, people and property, such as its market leading planning systems. Over 90% of UK local authorities are now customers. Idox provides public sector organisations with tools to manage information and knowledge, documents, content, business processes and workflow as well as connecting directly with the citizen via the web.

Last week I attended a workshop organised by Red Ninja Studios, bringing together a wide range of place based organisations, to explore what a technologically integrated future for Liverpool would look like. We spent the day exploring the three main domains of economy, health and transport, what the issues were in the city, what data was available and what innovative ideas we had to solve the issues through technology.

The discussion was interesting and lively but throughout the sessions I kept coming back to ‘why?’. Technology seemed to be the answer but what was the question, what were we trying to achieve?

Smart Cities is the latest policy buzzword – our briefing earlier in the week highlighted the wealth of research and development which is going on in this area and how great leaps in technology are changing the way we live and work in cities. The danger with looking at developing Smart Cities is that the opportunities and options are boundless, and this came through in the workshop. Smart travel systems, integrated health care, environmental measurement, technology development, graduate retention, high quality jobs, access to learning – all could be tackled through integrated next generation technology. So how do we prioritise and get the highest impact we can in a city such as Liverpool?

One of the participants asked “what connects all these ideas, what integrates them?” the simple answer is people, not technology.

So on returning to my desk (or rather my kitchen as I am one of the nation’s 4.2m home workers) I started to think about what ‘people’ would want from a technology driven environment, rather than what the technology will deliver to the people.

A guide on service design in smart cities highlights that we have to start with the ‘business proposition’; people have to be willing to ‘buy’ the service on offer. It highlights two reasons for improvement:

Improving customer service

Increasing the take up of services among key groups to achieve targets

Making it easier to access services

Giving a better service

Giving a service targeted to individual needs

Giving access to a broader range of services

Improving efficiency

Increasing take up among key groups to increase income

Increasing early take up and reducing more expensive interventions later

Improving processes to streamline services and reduce costs

Switching customers to more cost efficient channels

These business imperatives should be at the heart of any technology implementation and technology can impact across all these goals but, form should follow function.

When people were asked by Steer Davies Gleave what words describe a ‘Smart’ city their response was surprising. Although there were a wide range of answers (reflecting the diversity of the term), ‘clean’ and ‘technology’ came out top, followed by ‘transport’, ‘friendly’, ‘connect’, ‘internet’ and ‘eco’. Overall people said smart cities should aim to be ‘a pleasant place to live, work and socialise’ with a ‘healthy, vibrant economy’, and sustainability was at the bottom of the list. When answers were normalised for population, Oxford, York, Bath and Cambridge were seen as the most ‘smart’ cities – all areas with higher ‘smart’ populations as well as ‘nice’ places to live. The priorities for making cities smarter were seen as availability of facilities and services (shops, places to eat and drink, sports and entertainment), modern public transport and safe, secure travel. People want good quality of life experiences.

Future Everything presented a series of essays aimed at shifting the debate on future cities towards the central place of citizens and open urban infrastructures. The essays focus on how cities can create the policies, structures and tools to engender a more innovative and participatory society. Dan Hill discusses the idea that “smart citizens make smart cities” and a city cannot be ‘managed’– it’s a living organic response to people’s lives, where people are often invisible in the management of transport or infrastructure systems. As Hill says, smart cities do not exist, but smart citizens do. The city is its people and technology should enable people to come together.

Can we harness the power of the citizen as an ‘organic sensor’ to improve services, drawing them in to actively engage with improving society? Can a ‘smart city’ be one where active, participatory, citizenship becomes central to the development of infrastructure? If a cities’ smart citizens applied their Instagram, TripAdvisor and Twitter engagement to the transport network or the health centre they use would it drive more responsive services? The answer is yes, but only if those services are listening or care. How can technology help citizens reclaim their space; would we all share information if it improves our quality of life?

The challenge for technology is to respond to the smart citizen, the millennials and generation Alpha will have very different demands, ones we cannot conceive of now. The challenge for government and large technology firms is not to emphasise top-down solutions but to respond to the issues, aspirations and abilities of individuals and make personal and civic responsibility core to a Smart City Vision.

Recently, smart cities have emerged as a hot research topic, with cities, national governments and businesses exploring ways to exploit the potential of ICT to improve quality of life and achieve greater efficiency in service delivery.

Our new research briefing explores recent commentary and research in this area. It considers the definition of smart cities and highlights the characteristics of smart cities, and comments on issues which are being addressed in the built environment, such as the provision of appropriate digital infrastructure, decentralised energy and district heating schemes and energy efficiency measures.

The briefing takes a closer look at the deployment of smart technologies in the key area of transport and travel and discusses the commercial opportunities that smart cities present for businesses. It also considers issues with digital inclusion in smart cities, and the application of digital technologies in the co-production of internet-enabled services within emerging smart cities.